PNGAA Library

Three encounters with PNG, 1953-2012: Ian Maddocks

Based on an Address by Professor Ian Maddocks, AM, Senior Australian of the Year 2013, to the 13th Annual PNGAA Adelaide reunion lunch on Sunday 27 October 2013

Student experience

My first time in Papua New Guinea was as a medical student in December 1953.

The Department of External Territories offered employment as ‘Temporary Medical Assistant’, hoping to encourage return to PNG after graduation (which it did for more than a few). I was attached to Malahang Native Hospital out of Lae.

It was a heady experience for a fourth year student with almost no practical experience.

I was accorded immediate clinical responsibility—making diagnoses, assisting at operations, instructing native orderlies—under minimal supervision by a European medical assistant.

I went on ‘patrol’ and lined up villagers for rapid physical examinations.

Like other PNG towns, Lae was still recovering from the 1939-45 war. The main entertainment of the town was drinking at the RSL Club, a refuge for administration officers, most of them single males. I enjoyed my role as ‘Masta’, and was fascinated by the exotic cultural environment on display at ‘singsings’, where males in head dresses topped with bird of paradise plumes stomped to monotonous chants alongside bare-breasted maidens. I learnt to drink alcohol and to speak pidgin, instructing my personal haus boi.

The PNG I saw was a country of scattered individual villages. I knew culture was different in the Highlands, but my only acquaintance with that region was on a ‘milk-run’, facilitated by the friendly DC, Horrie Niall. It took all day for a DC3 to call at Goroka, Hagen, Wabag and Minj. Then back to Lae. The villagers I encountered were shy, quiet, and waited for instructions, usually from government officers who commonly were accepting a range of responsibilities far greater than they could ever have faced in Australia.

Medical Education

My second encounter with PNG extended from 1961 to 1974. I had intended to be a medical missionary but there was no mission opportunity available, so, in February 1961, with wife Diana and our one-year-old son, I went instead to the newly-opened medical school in Port Moresby.

Housing was at a premium as the suburb of Boroko grew to accommodate incoming Departmental officers. We were allocated the house of the Director of Medical Research, who had departed on leave for a year. We were intending to stay. Our personal effects—a large pantechnicon filled with furniture and books—was followed by our Volkswagen sedan; both arrived several weeks after us. A childless couple came with the house as domestic servants. We were required to keep them in employment so that the family on leave would have them waiting when they returned. They helped us present a colourful and neat garden, watering lawns and plants through the dry times. There were no fences. It seemed unnecessary to lock doors.

The Papuan Medical College was based in buildings designed in Australia as an animal house for the new Taurama Hospital. Cages were removed to form a lecture room. Increased Australian resources were expected, and in the meantime you made do.

The Principal, Dr Eric Wright, had been a medical assistant in Papua before the war and later completed medical training. Dr Ian Reid, a former missionary doctor, plus a couple of Australian medical assistants and a school teacher formed the initial faculty, along with two former Papuan medical assistants as ‘technicians’. 

I was to teach physiology and biochemistry to the second year of a five-year course and was also the town’s second physician specialist, supervising one half of the eighty-bed medical ward in the native hospital; Dr Charles Campbell, a highly respected physician in the town, had the other half. We each had a ‘resident’, a PNG graduate from the Central Medical School in Fiji. Some beds had mattresses, others were plain wooden forms covered in a blanket. 

We were preparing graduates for rural hospital placements, so a ‘rural experience’ seemed appropriate. I went with the second year class to survey villages along the Kumusi river (in 1961) and around Marshall Lagoon (in 1962). We conducted a census, drew maps, and collected measurements of height, weight, skin fold, peak flow rate, haemoglobin. In government ‘rest houses’, we shared the cooking, and under the pressure lamp in the evening exchanged jokes and stories. There were few such opportunities for genuine sharing with PNG nationals.

Port Moresby’s churches were important places for the Europeans of the town to meet, and a sense of Christian mission and optimism was common among the Australians we knew best. The Contact Club encouraged Australians to gather with Papuans and New Guineans. It self-consciously attracted a few locals with fluency in English and the necessary confidence; otherwise Australians commonly met indigenous men or women only in places of employment or as their domestic servants. The 1961 Port Moresby phone book held only expatriate names: there were no Papuans or New Guineans listed.

Family social life involved church, dinner parties with fellow Australians, cinema outings, Ela Beach, or weekend drives to Sogeri, where the cooler air and the rubber plantations of Koitaki and Itikinumu were an attraction. In 1960, Port Moresby had 6,000 nationals in villages and urban settlements and approximately 6,000 expatriates, mostly Australians. We recognized particular immigrant groups: Mekeo dandies with big hair and effeminate ways; Marshall Lagoon men skilled as house painters; Sepiks with decorative scars; the darker skins and hooked noses from the Gulf. We also recognized from a distance the ownership of most motor vehicles.

Port Moresby, like a small North Queensland town held delusions of grandeur, being also a national capital with all the necessary national institutions. We knew the ‘wantok’ system in PNG, bonding every person having the same language. The Australian wantok system was equally powerful: individuals holding positions of influence were often known by name, met-with socially, and accessible by phone. We learnt how to get things done, with a confidence in management that helped us later in Australia.

WHO assisted Territory health workers in overseas travel or further study. In 1963, WHO supported me for six months in Uganda at the Department of Paediatrics, Mulago Hospital, and then for the Diploma of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool. Research in PNG had messages for world medicine. I presented PNG blood pressure findings at an international conference in Edinburgh, suggesting that the low salt intake of Highland communities was important in their absence of hypertension.

In 1964, ‘natives’ were allowed for the first time to drink alcohol. A student said: ‘Doctor, I want to drink beer’, worried about how it might affect him.  I bought a bottle and we shared it. The College now had one teacher in each major academic discipline, but there was excellent teamwork. Staff-student sporting contests and ‘Island Nights’, in which both staff and students presented skits and performances, added to morale.

The first three graduates of the Medical College completed their course in 1964 and entered resident training. Were they ‘doctors’ after completing our shorter course? The decision was ‘yes’. The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) began to admit students in 1966. Many were primed for leadership roles in the years ahead. It was a clear hope and expectation that the Medical College would move into the University. Canberra opposed this, however, wanting to require medical graduates to remain under government control, and not qualify for practice overseas. The College and the PNG medical profession generally raised a howl of protest, but Canberra remained intransigent.

In 1967 the Pangu Pati formed, and quickly spawned other political groupings wanting to share in the move towards independence. Student Ebia Olewale, whom we met at church, and who later became a leading political figure, brought us the small Pangu membership card. We paid the fee and, at least in name, were early members.

Pari Village

Through 1965 and 1966 I made frequent visits to Pari Village, taking individual measurements relevant to blood pressure. I met there a youngster studying at the largely expatriate Port Moresby High School. He had difficulties studying in the crowded single room house, lit only by one lamp, no privacy, and I suggested that he might benefit by staying at our house, close to his school, Monday to Friday. Isi Kevau and his fellow Pari student, Nou Oru, spent the school week with us for the remainder of 1965. Both did well enough in the New South Wales examinations to proceed to further study: Isi to medical school, Nou to theological college.

That contact led us to think of living in Pari. A site for a house was offered close to Isi’s house over the sea. The house posts were erected with much village cooperation one weekend, and later two Pari carpenters completed a small dwelling for us. We stayed for six years, providing a basic medical service for the village. Through that time I was first acting Dean of the proposed medical faculty, developing plans for its structure and funding, and then Foundation Dean after Canberra relented.

Life in Pari separated us from our former social life as Port Moresby suburbanites. I attended Pari church on Sundays, spent evenings seeing Pari patients, and weekends collecting stories and taking photographs in the village. Social interaction was in daily village life and at special events. Insights into the history and traditional life as it was in old Pari, the stories and songs of the old folk, and the genealogies back fourteen generations became our abiding interest.

Global decolonisation pressures made PNG Independence more a matter of timing than conjecture and University graduates prepared for major future roles. Moresby was changing, growing rapidly with a major immigration of Highlanders. Fences were being built around houses and dogs were kept as defence against intrusion. Pari became a much safer environment than Boroko. After an incident at a Papua versus New Guinea rugby match, a riot broke out. Pari village panicked as rumours spread that the New Guineans were coming to attack. The village chief (rarely evident as a figure of authority) appeared on the beach and ordered women and children to be ready to take to the water, and some families loaded their canoes.

Pari, with its early access to education opportunities, was well placed to participate in the urgent changes now being promoted towards localisation, with new positions of status becoming available for locals with talent. Oala Oala was already Port Moresby’s first Lord Mayor; Buri Kidu returned from University in Australia as a lawyer and was later first indigenous Chief Justice. Isi Kevau became the first PNG graduate in the UPNG-awarded MBBS, and was later Professor of Medicine and Dean; Nou Oru became a Bishop.

Leaving PNG

We left Papua New Guinea at the end of 1974 with mixed feelings, sad to leave Pari village, but keen not to stay on and pretend old authority or exercise unwelcome influence in the new jurisdiction. Those whom we had come to ‘help’, an attitude with which we were increasingly uncomfortable, were taking over. Those who had been my students were now achieving status in the Health Department or academic status at UPNG. It was time to get out of the way. Our son was ready for the upper forms of high school, and would probably benefit from exposure to a wider environment. Yet we were apprehensive about moving back to Australia. Much had changed there also.

We planned to return to Australia in company with another medical family, which had shared much of our life experience. We would live as a community in Australia, and explore some of the lessons about community we had appreciated in PNG. Our plans were assisted by the generous compensation arrangements made for retiring PNG public servants. 

Our community experiment continued for three and a half years, and was a powerful experience. Neither financially nor professionally was time spent in PNG a disadvantage. I was accepted as a visiting specialist at the newly opened Flinders Medical Centre with the status of a university associate professor. Many colleagues from PNG found similar opportunities as new initiatives in academic or administrative aspects of community medicine were launched under Whitlam.

A Time of Disappointment: 2000-12

For two decades following our departure in 1974 I had only limited contact with PNG. In the 1990s, I met Dr John Waiko, pioneer UPNG student and academic, visiting Adelaide in his capacity as PNG Minister for Education. He noted, ‘I could put you on the Council of the University’, and did. I stayed a member for over a decade, attending meetings two or three times a year, participating carefully when an Australian academic observation seemed appropriate. I was impressed by the calibre of the students and the vigour of debate as councillors sought to squeeze—from inadequate and usually delayed government grants and frugal student fees—sufficient resources to meet growing student numbers and expectations. I quickly became aware of, and distressed by, UPNG’s inadequate infrastructure. A tour of student accommodation showed that any item that could be moved had been stolen: there were no lounge chairs, no toilet seats, no mirrors, and no shower heads. 

Papua New Guinea had not become the country envisaged by the Australian colonial administration left in 1975. Australia’s civil servants believed they were leaving behind a new nation on the path to good governance and self-sufficiency. We knew of the troubles that other former colonies acquiring independence commonly experienced, but we hoped that PNG would somehow be an exception; that the structures and processes of government that Australian officers had designed in consultation with the emerging PNG leadership group in the early 1970s would be maintained and strengthened, and that benevolent oversight and support from Australia would continue to guide the young nation.

The 2008 Waigani Seminar, Living History and Evolving Democracy, held at UPNG, reviewed the goals and principles enunciated by the constitutional planning committee which had set the rules for the independent PNG.  Bernard Narakobi, a member of that committee, and later author, scholar and statesman, could only lament, ‘Nearly 40 years on, we celebrate our miserable failure’. 

In retrospect, we Australians might have been more guarded and more sceptical. Not all has failed, because the constitution remains in place with a semblance of democracy, albeit overlaid with blatant corruption. The country’s eight hundred distinct language groups inevitably constrain ideals of nationhood, cooperation and service for the common good. The idea of provincial governments was a valid attempt to lessen the domination of Port Moresby, but it added another layer of bureaucracy and additional opportunities to skim money from budgets for personal gain. 

Corruption gradually has infiltrated all levels of society. It allows some to profit, to make a good life, building large houses protected by dogs and three-metre fences. A far greater number, low wage earners or unemployed, live with poverty and hunger far more intense than was usual in traditional life. At all levels of governance, inaction and delay characterise official responses, allocated monies disappear, and contracts are not fulfilled. Even in church affairs it seems people find it difficult to avoid participation in corrupt practices.

Medical graduates have rejected employment in regional areas and instead have established urban private practices, helping them afford private schooling for their children or investing in houses in Queensland.

Port Moresby is a city of nearly half a million. Its infrastructure has not kept pace, and roads, water, power and telephones are quite inadequate. Maintenance of all kinds hardly exists, and much public housing has fallen into such disrepair as to be uninhabitable.

Port Moresby is no longer a place of the Motu, or even of coastal Papuans; it throngs with ‘outsiders’, particularly from the New Guinea Highlands, who form aggressive gangs ready for arbitrary violence. The sheer numbers of those from the New Guinea side means far greater competition for employment; university graduates are no longer assured of a job. Car theft and burglary are commonplace, as is the use of firearms. Pari village, its population now three times larger, knows real hunger, and families in poverty are unable to afford school fees or adequate nutrition. Some make desperate attempts to earn a kina through distilling alcohol (‘steam’), while so often there appears to be a lack of appropriate leadership.

Could it have been different?

Port Moresby has been described as one of the world’s least comfortable and safe locations. Those of us who survive from the years before Independence uniformly feel both sadness and disappointment about the ways in which PNG has progressed.

We must acknowledge that we are creatures of our time. In the 1950s, Australians were racist at home just as they were in PNG. As well-meaning colonialists, we tried to direct PNG towards being a nation run like Australia. We taught medicine in the ways we had been taught. Circumstances change, and things evolve.

The Motuans with whom Diana and I were most familiar have seemed powerless to withstand the urban violence that is led mainly by Highlanders. Their reefs are dynamited, gardens despoiled, village events gate-crashed. Some blame the protectionist policies implemented by Sir Hubert Murray during his long pre-war governorship; or judge that independence came too quickly; others recognize the fragmented demography of the nation and the primacy of the wantok system, whereby all others are rivals, foreigners or enemies fit only for exploitation. This feeds narrow advantage and is a poor preparation for nationhood. PNG’s uneven post-independence course could probably not have been different.